Chatroulette now makes money referring flashers to Hustler.com

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Chatroulette was the big thing earlier in the year, but traffic numbers have been consistently dwindling over the past few months as users have grown disenchanted with the service.

Still, Chatroulette founder Andrey Ternovskiy wants people to know that rumors of Chatroulette’s death are greatly exaggerated: the service is alive, kicking and now more penis-free than ever before.

What’s that? Penis-free? Indeed. Even though initiating a random Chatroulette video chat had become synonymous with finding yourself staring at a bored frat boy’s schlong, Chatroulette has adopted an extremely innovative way of filtering out their randy users while simultaneously monetizing the site. Now, Chatroulette users who just can’t keep their pants up have their dongs autodetected and they are kicked to Hustler’s official website, which pays Chatroulette for the referrals. Genius!

Apparently, the system is a huge success. According to Ternovskiy, the number of flashers on Chatroulette has now dwindled to just one in two hundred… which is way down from our estimate of one in two six months ago.

The problem is, Chatroulette still feels very much like a du jour site. For all of Ternovskiy’s rosiness, the traffic numbers Chatroulette enjoys are down to a quarter of what they were, at least according to Google Analytics, and Chatroulette still isn’t very successful at monetizing even that traffic. You can’t build a billion dollar web business off of referring the occasional nudist to pornographic websites… can you?